Atlanta, Georgia, USA

The City of Atlanta faces an infrastructure backlog with pressing challenges for its roads, bridges, sidewalks, and public building and facilities. That’s why Mayor Kasim Reed passed the Renew Atlanta Infrastructure Bond – to dedicate USD $250 million to reimagine Atlanta as a safe and smart city. As part of the bond, Atlanta set the goal to reduce the number of pedestrian and vehicle crashes along its North Avenue Corridor.

In 2014, the crash rate on North Avenue was more than 200% worse than the statewide average for similar corridors.

To determine the best solutions to reduce the North Avenue crash rate, and ultimately save lives, Together for Safer Roads analyzed hyper-local root causes of collision risk and created analytical indices to estimate risk levels. Analysis was based on curating and aggregating data sources from the City of Atlanta’s publicly available data and coalition member companies’ private data. Insights were then consumed through an interactive visual dashboard.

Insights uncovered that increase collision risk include:

Congestion around events

Rainy conditions during early morning hours

Susceptibility to water logging around high traffic segments

Driver behavior of failing to yield and changing lanes improperly

The Safer Roads Challenge in Atlanta demonstrates the power of data and public-private partnerships. Crashes dropped by nearly 40 percent in the North Avenue Corridor when comparing October and November 2016 to the same period in 2017. The North Avenue Corridor is well on its way to delivering on the promise of being one of the nation’s most advanced “Smart” Corridors. As a next step, Together for Safer Roads is currently collaborating with the City of Atlanta to validate and determine how to scale the model for integration into daily operations.